Comment by erichocean

11 hours ago

[flagged]

Why would the Europeans want a high-quality open source model that isn't either owned by American Trillion-dollar companies or created by the Chinese? You really can't think of any reasons?

  • > high-quality open source model

    > that isn't owned

    I don't know what definition of open weights you are using, but the "open" part is what allows you to use it without being beholden to American Trillion-dollar companies or the Chinese.

    Mistral could do exactly what Cursor does, and post-train the model to meet the needs of Europeans.

    That's a far more efficient (and useful!) use of GPUs than yet another pretrain on an outdated model backbone.

Has the French military advanced the state of the art on any dimension in the last hundred years?

And if not, why do they exist?

  • Of course they have!

    • Regardless though, their reason to exist is not to advance the state of the art.

      Their reason to exist is to ensure the sovereignty of France.

      Obviously they would do their job better if they were advancing the state of the art, but it's not like it's pointless if they arent the absolute best.

So that there exists an EU-native option in the near-frontier LLM space?

Not everyone is wild about being downstream of either the Chinese or US governments, particularly when it comes to things like cybersecurity

Just like Microsoft and most companies around PCs, their existence isn't about pushing any boundaries, but seemingly targeting deploying what's already been "invented" into the corporate world and bigger companies. Not "wrong", just different.

  • Sure, agreed. But they do their own pre-training, at great expense, on outdated model backbones.

    Wouldn't it be better to do something more like Cursor, and RL on an existing pretrained model if you're not innovating anyway?